Patrick J. Volkerding announced the first release candidate of Slackware 12 in the current changelog. This will be the first Slackware release with a kernel from the 2.6 tree (2.6.21.5) as default. "It's that time again, and here we have Slackware 12.0 release candidate 1! If we're lucky, we got it all right the first time. Big thanks to the crew."

I have just installed Slackware 12 on my 1.6 GHz Pentium IV system with 512 Mb SDRAM and legacy PCI nVIDIA Geforce4 440 video card ( legacy driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9639-pkg1.run ) and , O,my God, it's blazing fast.
I manage to download and burn DVD iso image from this FTP server and it took little less than 6 hours
(NOTE: it's unofficial DVD built approx. 3.7 GB in size): ftp://ftp.slackware.no/pub/linux/ISO-images/slackware/Current-ISO-...
This is my Slackware 12 uname -a output:
Linux slack12 2.6.21.3-smp #2 SMP Thu May 24 21:09:15 CDT 2007 i686 pentium4 i386 GNU/Linux
and believe it or not, once KDE is loaded it uses only
75 Mb memory.
I knew this is going to be a great KDE 3.5.7 ( there's also XFCE 4) distro since I'm already running excellent Vector Linux 5.8 and beautifull Zenwalk 4.6.1 both based on "big daddy" Slackware simply because I can enjoy all rich multimedia even on my Pentium II based machines thanks to rock solid and reliable packages.
I'll certainly keep toying with this RC1 release and
also help reporting about(hopefully not to many) bugs in case I came accross one.
Great work Patrick; I'm on your side.